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Comment by ajb | Hacker News Reader

We just built a £5B sewage tunnel bigger than the Elizabeth line[1] across London, it's hard to see why there should still be discharges into the Thames.

The other problem is that much of our system was built before it was recognised that it's better to have separate sewage and surface water systems. (Oddly enough, the word sewage originally referred to surface water drainage, not excrement).

[1] The Elizabeth line is our newest and widest metro line. The new tunnel at 7m diameter is larger, although technically since it only goes in one direction it's only bigger than half the Elizabeth line - it being the general consensus that sewage does not need to make a return journey.

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To be fair, the Thames Tideway is storage, whereas the Elizabeth Line is transit.

That is, if you're stuck in a tunnel on an Elizabeth Line train for an hour that's a fault, everybody wants to fix that and then you'll get to Reading or, Heathrow (airport) or Woolwich or whatever.

But a turd in the Thames Tideway is supposed to be sat there, it's temporary storage, the idea is if twice as much rainfall as normal happens over a 24 hour period, we don't need twice as much sewage treatment capacity, we just need to store those turds for a while so that on average it works out OK.

Which still doesn't answer your original objection - Thames Water are shit, blame the Tories for once again taking a monopoly at point of use service which costs money and "improving" it by giving private investors a way to make money and then saying Oops when of course they take the money but leave the problem they were supposed to be solving unfixed.

In the very big picture the original problem, as for our rail infrastructure, is that England is very, very old. London has a single Combined (ie rain water and human effluent mix) sewer system because it was built many years before anybody invented separated sanitary and rain water sewers. A retro-fit upgrade, which some US cities have done, is incredibly expensive, nobody wants to pay for that even if it could be attempted. I don't anybody has even tried to estimate for London. Tens of Billions of pounds? Hundreds?

FWIW where I live in London the issue is that the local drains going along residential etc streets are overwhelmed. So there are various overflow locations etc where when the sewers are full to bursting and overflowing back up into people's toilets, they don't and instead overflow into local water courses. We're miles away from the super sewer, so they'd need to improve the capacity from our house all the way for that to work.

We have a particular issue with just surface water (not sewage luckily!) where I live. Usual finger pointing game between the council and Thames water and us, but the word from the guy from the council is that the surface water drains are just too small for modern weather systems, so when we get a very heavy downfall we have water being forced up and out of the drains where our guttering empties into, leading to about 2 or 3 inches of water around the entire house before it drains away into lower land in the garden.

I don't fully believe him that the pipes are too small (it rained in the past too!) - I suspect it is just partially silted-up/blocked/collapsed somewhere nearby after over 100 years of neglect, but of course Thames water have no money nor impetus to fix it. We've had non-return valves fitted in the pipes on our property (at a fairly large expense since we had to dig down) to try and abate our house getting flooded when it rains. So far so good....

> Thames water have no money nor impetus to fix it.

No impetus, sure, but they have had money - they just paid it out in dividends to shareholders instead of using it to invest and fix problems.

Indeed. The privatisation of the English water companies has been a literal shit show. The price to the consumer (e.g. me) goes up every year, but there is ever more shit in our rivers and shit on our beaches. Why? Because my fees go to paying dividends (often to foreign companies and governments) and massive bonuses, while the system falls apart. Last I heard, Thames Water was £14B in debt. The government is apparently unable or unwilling to do anything about it. The water company is a monopoly, so I have no choice in the mater, beyond stopping using water. This is how rapacious capitalism works.

Well yeah, why fix the drains when they can run a business etc.

I think it is fairly ludicrous to allow something like this to be privatised. It just doesn't make sense to me but then I am not PM.

I am kinda hoping they'll let it go bankrupt and then nationalise it for pennies-on-the-pound (a "haircut" for the investors).

To be fair to our ancestors, their sewage composition was much simpler than the exotic chemical cocktail we send down the drain nowadays.

Depends on what Industry was dumping into sewers at the time; there tends to be less of that these days.

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